Thank you to everyone who read/left a review last chapter! I appreciate you all! I've been having a blast writing, and I can't wait to start chapter three. We'll get a chance to learn more about the mystery girl from across the pond. ;) Enjoy!

It had taken thirty years for phasing through walls to feel anything close to normal, but it would never be as easy as using the door. As much as she had come to embrace - even enjoy - her vampirism and all the quirks that came with it, Seras still savored the familiarity of human limitation. At this point, she had been dead longer than she had ever been alive, but she never wanted being a vampire to wholly define her. It had been some time, however, since Integra would let her enjoy the simple pleasure walking into her office.

Stepping through a wall was like diving headfirst into the pool. Imagining it that way had helped her move fluidly rather than bouncing off the wallpaper, or worse, becoming trapped in the plaster. She reclined her chin towards her chest and held her arms snug at her sides, an eyebrow twitching down in irritation as the memory of raucous French laughter echoed in her memory. Sometimes it seemed that Pip was harder on her than even Master ever was.

Au contraire, he purred in her mind, roused by her thoughts, I simply-...eh...coached you.

"Coached me? Is that what you call bullying?" Seras muttered under her breath as her upper half materialized in the Hellsing leader's wide, open office. She flicked her gaze through her shaggy blonde hair to see Integra bent over the documents in front of her while tapping a pen against the edge of her desk. Pip fell silent, as he often did when she was working.

She always, always, always locked her office door nowadays. Seras stopped asking why months ago; the last living Hellsing got touchy about it. Sir Integra had always been stern, but it came in heated waves in her old age. Time made her patient, decades to bond had softened their relationship. But on a bad day? Asking about the locked door was accusatory to the aging woman's ears. Vampire or not, Seras didn't deliberately seek out Integra's wrath.

"Sir?" Seras prompted as her boots reached the ground with a gentle thud, rolling one shoulder to acclimate her body from phasing.

"Seras?" Sir Integra didn't bother looking over at her, her name more of a hum than a word. Behind her round glasses, Integra's eyes were cutting through words like knives through water. For all her talk about the Hellsing Organization bowing to government control, Integra wasn't delegating her responsibilities in the slightest. She was alive, and Hellsing was her's until she wasn't, and yet Seras wondered whether it was a good idea for Integra to begin slowly stepping down. It would be more than a tragedy when the world lost this huntress in a suit; it would be a madhouse here. Even with the late Sir Penwoods grandson to take the reins, there would always be those who would wish to steal them or delegate them elsewhere. But it wasn't something they talked about terribly much...then again, neither was the locked door. In any case, there were more pressing matters on Seras' mind.

Seras chewed on the edge of her lower lip briefly before wetting it for speech. She needed more than a quarter of Integra's attention. She wasn't bothering her with a trifle, and rather than beating around the bush, she spoke firmly to secure her mistress' ear.

"Sir, we have a problem."

Her eyes stopped and froze. Integra never glanced away from paperwork, but Seras could feel more than see Integra's attention shift. Instincutally, Seras tensed; urgency could make her nervous, even if she didn't fear anyone or anything.

"Kindly elaborate, then," the elder woman's voice crackled on a weary sigh. Fatigue and weakness are two different things, and the Hellsing leader didn't confuse the two the way she was apt to in her youth. She was a workaholic. There was no getting around that. As she was more patient with Seras, she had become more lenient of her own needs over time. She would soon retire. Seras could see the need in the flat darkness circling her eyes, which were at least as sharp and blue as the had ever been. "It's been a long day. I'm tired. This best be worth my time."

"Yes, of course, sir. The problem is kind of-...ehm. It's a problem inside of a problem."

Seras was met with a perfect deadpan.

The grandfather clock near the portrait of the previous Sir Hellsing ticked in impatience, the only sound keeping the room alive. After a beat, Seras' footsteps joined the rhythm, a thud on the ground for every tick the clock tocked, until she was leaning with palms face down on Integra's cluttered desk. When Integra narrowed her eyes, her glasses flashed, as if in acceptance of whatever challenge was dawning on them. It was nothing worse than they had faced before. That's what Sir Integra had said of every misfortune since the calamity of Millennium. It had always been true.

But this was unlike anything they could have expected.

"Alucard can't hear what I'm going to tell you," Seras inched her face further forward, her voice low enough now that it didn't echo in the outstandingly large room, "Because I'm not sure if it was his doing, or-..."

Tick. Tock. Integra blinked in a slow, measured way. Tick tock.

Seras heard that clock and almost believed she felt her own heartbeat in her ears, if only that were possible. Her palms slid, papers shuffling under her hands quietly. Without breaking their stare, Integra steadied the stack of reports she had been studying, long fingers splayed across the tiny type-print.

"Is anything broken? Is anyone broken?"

Unlike Seras, Integra made no effort to hush her words, and her iron tone reverberated around them. Seras cringed in response, averting her eyes after giving a firm shake of the head.

"No, it's nothing like that, but-..."

"...just spit it out, Seras. You're behaving like a child."

Seras reached up and rubbed her ear as if expecting it to be given a harsh tug, but when the pull never came, she brushed the back of her hair instead. She swallowed once, briefly closing her eyes, before opening them again to look at Integra with more solemnity. The light of the night was filling the grand office, shadows and moonlight catching the draculina's face, darkness instigating the devilish brightness of her red eyes.

While the eyes were filled with knowing, it was the mouth that told the tale.

He must have been away too long. It was long enough to addle his fledgling's brain. Or maybe it had simply been long enough to make him forget how stupidly naive she could be. Thirty years could change that, he would think. But Alucard was old enough to know without a doubt that there are some constants in this world. One of those constants is history. They say it repeats itself, which he supposed was true.

What no one fails to mention is that history might repeat, but the reactions don't have to remain unaltered.

He didn't need to eavesdrop on Seras and Integra to know what was going on. He had felt Seras' curiosity, then suspicion, and finally, outrage as she slowly uncovered a scandal on her daytime patrol. Her anxiety was so acute he felt that he could reach into her mind and use a finger to trace its path from this thought to the next, but she surprised him when the trail was suddenly too far out of his reach. The one danger of tapping into his fledgling's mind - one that he wasn't yet accustomed to - was that she was experienced enough to know when he was rummaging around.

Seras Victoria was never as stupid as she seemed. This was one of the most fatal things he forgot. In thirty years, she had been practicing what he tried to teach. Still, she trusted him too much. He would reap the rewards of that.

He was out of the manor and off the Hellsing Organization grounds before Integra could shoot out of her chair and begin to pace. He imagined that she would smoke to steady her nerves. He also predicted that she wouldn't do anything to stop him. Not yet. Their relationship was different than before.

Upon his return from the ethers, she had fed him her blood as an homecoming present. A gift of freedom; a release from subordination, because much like Seras, Integra had always let her childhood affinity towards him soften her judgement somewhat. It was the second time he had tasted her, and the magic in her blood. That magic that bound him. That blood he was bound to...

...that blood he was bound to...

He passed through the shadows of London, the ebbs and corners of the city all much different than before, but he always felt at home in the darkness. It took mere moments for him to slip like liquid through the darkness to the blood he had been bound to long before the Hellsings. The world had looked different then.

But she had hardly changed.